Call for Contributions: Ethical Principles for Museum Collections

18 June 2026

CIMAM's Museum Watch Committee (MW) is launching a new research initiative to develop a framework of ethical principles to guide building and maintaining a museum collection through processes of acquisition, accessioning, safeguarding, and caretaking, which can translate across a wide range of sociocultural contexts and political conditions.

This new initiative is motivated by widespread concerns around recent cases that have highlighted the precarity of collections, private and public, which have been built with care and expertise but have faced a sudden change in their governance or ownership without proper input from those responsible for their stewardship or from the communities that benefit most from their integrity and accessibility.

Collections of modern and contemporary art have particular challenges. To give a few examples: artists who created the works in these collections may still be alive and hold moral rights. In case artists are no longer living, their living descendents or representatives may have inherited rights related to the works. In cases of donation or bequest, the donors or their descendents may hold certain conditions, rights, or expectations.

Furthermore, funding sources and governance structures vary widely across the world. Unexpected changes to or undermining of the legitimacy of a collection may be attributed to conditions that are deemed or alleged to be untranslatable or incomprehensible in other contexts. Contextual differences may be instrumentalised for political or other purposes.

The initiative will also examine the distinction between what constitutes legal ownership and custodial responsibility, especially in cases where private collections have acquired public significance through scholarship, exhibition histories, national heritage frameworks, and long-term public access. The project will consider not only the acquisition of individual works, but also the ethical responsibility to preserve the integrity of collections as historically formed bodies of knowledge.

It will also emphasize that collections should go beyond conservation, focusing on access, sharing, and public value as part of institutions’ responsibility, and will highlight mechanisms such as collaborative research, education, collection exchange, and engagement with originating communities.

It will address different ownership models and their impact on access to cultural heritage, and the importance of digital archiving and open access as key tools to broaden availability and democratize collections.

This project proposes to create a lexicon of terms and definitions, using case studies of successes as well as challenges, in hopes of making a toolbox that could be as widely applicable as practicably possible.

The preliminary list of terms and definitions to be addressed in this initiative include: accessioning, acquisition, approval, bequest, by-laws, collection, commission, committee, conflict of interest, custody, deaccessioning, deed, dispersal, donation, due diligence, export, gift, governance, integrity, license, long-term loan, ownership, patrimony, policy, proposal, provenance, public access, restriction, stewardship, title, and transparency.

CIMAM, as an Affiliated Organisation of the International Council of Museums (ICOM), has embedded the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums at the core of its mission since its establishment, recognising it as the principal ethical framework for advancing professional standards in modern and contemporary art museums. This CIMAM initiative aims to complement the ICOM Code of Ethics by contributing perspectives from the modern and contemporary art museum field, while offering insights of relevance across the wider museum sector.

Call for Contributions:

CIMAM Members are invited to participate in this research initiative by contributing their perspectives, insights, and professional experience.

The call seeks to explore case studies of successes as well as challenges, and examples.

➝ Deadline to submit your contributions is 1 September, 2026 at 8:00 am CEST

Additionally, CIMAM Members are encouraged to contribute further by joining one of the focus groups that will be organized across different time zones. These discussions will offer a more open and safe space to share experiences, exchange knowledge, and deepen collective reflection within the CIMAM professional community.

All contributions will be acknowledged in the final document unless contributors explicitly request otherwise.